Hey guys, Jenna here.
I cover a variety of alternative and eco-friendly lifestyles in these videos,
but this is the first time I've ever featured a couple who's trying to achieve
zero waste. And while they're limiting their impact on the earth,
they're also living in a teeny tiny house.
Let's dive right in to this week's video tour.
I'm Mikayla Holsinger and I'm Ben Barker.
And this is Oakey the tiny house.
Yeah, we've been living in Oakey for about 15 months now. Oakey
is 18 feet long, about eight feet wide.
Our house doesn't bump out over the wheel wells, so it's a pretty tight,
easy to travel with. Our total square footage is about 133 square feet.
We had really wanted to make less impact.
We wouldn't be able to afford a 30 year mortgage in Seattle basically.
But that idea felt really scary and something that we didn't really want to do
at the time. Very coincidental.
I went and had coffee with a acquaintance of mine.
He mentioned during our meeting, um, building a tiny house and I, I said, Oh,
you know, Ben and I would love to talk to you about building your tiny house.
We have plans to build a bus and he said, my tiny houses for sale,
do you want to buy it? And then within four months we were living in this house.
We've done a bunch of sort of updates. Um, when we moved into this house,
the entire house was this wood.
We wanted to kind of tone the log cabin vibe down a little bit,
painted the walls white. We brought some of that blue into the kitchen.
We're working towards zero waste in a space like this.
It's really encouraged us to make sure that we buy good quality products but
then have just the things we need. When we first moved in,
we were actually metering our own utilities and water and we used less than 200
gallons of water in a month for two of us,
which was pretty cool to like see how little impact we could really have
environmentally using a composting toilet instead of a standard flush toilet is
huge.
There's sort of little things everywhere that catch you
trying to be zero waste. Like, if you buy produce, there's stickers.
You know? Those are often made out of plastics.
Sometimes they're made out of paper.
It's also given us a chance to kind of focus on what else can I do with this
thing I already need to have.
Come on in. You can see Oakey
Oakey means the awareness of the smallness of your
perspective and so we named the house Oakey, this is the nook.
We spend most of our time here. This pulls to a twin bed,
which is super nice. We can have visitors.
The one thing that I like thought about living in a tiny is that we would never
really be able to have guests over, but we totally can.
We spend a lot of time sitting on this chair.
so this is,
this is some storage like keep like the sheets for this bed in there.
I made these, these are like 35 millimeter films. I got them at an estate sale.
Ben does a lot of dehydrating of things and we have like a big dehydrator that's
outside,
but he put these in and then he can put just like there's some seeds dehydrating
cause this is our dining room table. So
we have, this was one of my,
we were like dealing with shoe storage all the time.
That was such a huge issue for us.
And so Ben built this out of like a half pallet pick up, you know,
just the room behind the door. The flower uh,
like chandelier things are from a market in Lao, I believe. I got them.
We really like art and that's been one of the hardest things is just like not
having as many walls as we used to have for all of our art.
This is where we keep all of our clothes. I was not,
I downsized a lot but really like clothing.
So we have a quite a bit of clothes storage and we have this closet.
These are mostly like his,
some of his fancier clothes and then we have just games and stuff down there.
This is a bunch of storage space.
I keep like socks and underwear in there and then Ben,
he's an herbalist and so he is working on turning these into drawers.
Wishes it was done earlier but he keeps all of his like dried herbs and stuff in
these drawers.
The floor I believe was actually like it was supposed to have texture in it and
they like forgot to put texture in it and so Adam actually got it for super
cheap or maybe even free and they were like it's not enough to like do any
space. And he was like, actually it is like it is enough space.
You got a Dickinson propane heater? Yeah,
we have a electric heater that we use in the winter mostly because around here
electricity is hydro powered versus burning more propane.
We have this and the electricity went out a few times this winter and it was
super nice to be able to have it and keep the house he did,
but we do use usually just the electric heater.
This is the loft, it's the width of a King size mattress.
So when Ben and I were looking at tiny living like that was one of the issues
was how tall he is and then we just happened to find this house that was built
by a very tall man.
I work nights and so it's super nice to sleep in the loft because I can
basically shut this and have very little light.
We call it the womb, it's like a womb room,
but the hardest part of this is making the bed like the beds never made like this.
This is an illusion across from here as a storage loft.
It is just that it's storage. We,
the ladder can come off and hook on to the railing on the other side and up
there we just have like, we have some camping gear and some important files.
I keep my banjo up there and stuff like that.
Alrighty. This is a bathroom. It's tiny, but it works. Um,
we have the giant composting toilet.
This can hold up to like six months of bulk and then you can turn it here and
then you actually can, can drop it, um, into, uh,
a tray at the bottom and bring it out as finished compost.
Just a shower. Do you shower in here or right now we don't actually,
we were using it. It's a mess. We're using it as storage, but um, we could,
there's a shower on the property, uh, attached to one of the warehouses.
So that's what we've been doing when we were living in Seattle.
We were using it, but as long as we don't have to.
I'm going to show you guys the kitchen.
I do a lot of cooking kind of stuff, stashed everywhere.
Kind of a journey to always work a lot with like what needs to be refrigerated
and um,
luckily now I work at a farm and we have a garden too so I can get a lot of
fresh stuff and not have to make extra trips to the store during the week.
Well this is our spice rack. It's actually an old uh,
Coca-Cola glass bottle case. This is the only thing in the house,
so it has to do dual purpose.
I cut some old Cedar fence boards and made little shelves here in the corner for
like our or floss or dental stuff. Got the toothbrush up there.
We got a two burner right here, which can get a little tight sometimes,
but it works out a couple of bins here for all the jar lids for fermenting and,
and storing. We use them in the fridge. We use a lot of Mason jars.
We've got the tiny super tiny fridge down here.
Just so happens to work really well with the size of the storage containers that
we have.
This is kind of a cool thing we have are a lot of people call them on paper
towels. We call them kitchen cloth.
It's nice cause you can use it more than a paper towel and then you just launder
it.
One of the other things we try to do is use reusable containers
so we can reduce our waste, especially if it's plastic waste.
Do you ever cook together in here? Never. No, it's,
it's pretty much impossible actually. Kind of.
I get a little territorial sometimes.
Like if I'm already in here and Mikayla needs anything, I'm like no go sit down.
What do you need? Like you can't be in here right now. Too many things going on.
This is their porch. A lot of people compliment the porch,
which is funny cause it's actually kind of one of the things that we wish we
didn't have on that tiny house.
We feel like it kinda eats up like nine square feet would be really
cool to have. We live just South of Olympia a little bit.
We have basic water hookup.
Kind of trying to bring a little bit of the garden by about here.
Got some planters that we picked up. This one's got some hops.
I'm trying to have grow up the side of the house cause we have like full
Sun exposure right here and some shade would be really nice on those 85
plus days
and then easy herbs like rosemary and thyme and we have some basil growing.
There's a big garden but it's kind of far away and so these are just easy
things.
This is a garden I started constructing early this spring,
medicinal and culinary herbs in here.
Some familiar ones you'd know like a Sage and thyme and oregano.
I recycled some pallets and built up some raised beds, this where I grow most
of the veggies.
We incubated and hatched our own chick for our own flock.
They're a heritage breed chicken, both great egg layers,
we did a ton of research on chickens and he actually got super into them when
these guys were tiny and fluffy and little babies. Then I was convinced,
I'm not exactly sure what these breeds,
when they start laying 18 maybe even 20 weeks,
because they're a heritage breed birds.
Prior to moving into the house,
I had a lot of like tearful nights of just being like, what if we hate it? Like,
what if we, you know, and that hasn't been our, it hasn't been at all.
It's super nice to have outside space, obviously. Um,
but we, I don't know. We do really well together. Yeah.
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